errrrrr

am slightly traumatized yet also strangely invigorated by my weekend. i played my first calcetto tournament. i have a big professional looking bag with my full team uniform (slightly farcical in view of how completely crap we are), a couple of bruises and my eyes very much open to a reality very much different from my own.
in short i spent 3 days in close quarters in a parallel universe.
it was like going back to highschool. but with the white trash (of rome). there were the small-in crowds formed by the cuter, bitchier girls who thought their shit didn't stink and thought themselves so much cooler on pitch and off. there where the chubby girls who were the king's jester and crowd pleasers cracking gags. there was the unfortunate kid that got picked upon for having braces. looking weird and dressing weird and being an all-round loser who just kept making things worse by trying to ingratiate herself. there were the loners and mavericks who didn't give a fuck. there were the older kids who looked on and saw that there was was a life beyond high school.

our "tournament" was, it turned out, 4km from assisi (though no one apart from me and my new BFF on the team seemed to have any interest in going to see this little jewel of a place). the teams were of the highest calibre. nothing to do with us pathetic misfits. we had two teams. one, on the cards, the better one who actually got wiped off the face of the planet 17-0 with the goal keeper from the other camp coming in to humiliatingly score goals. then there was the team of the "pippe" where i was. and we fared rather better, i must say. maybe we had no expectations. we put our all in. we ran like loons. we attempted to pass balls. and i wasn't adverse to knocking the goal keeper down to score our single goal. yet we also lost, errr...8-1. we counted our "victories" by the margins of our losses. we managed a 3-0. YAY FOR US! GO TEAM! there was drama of course. rows broke out among the egos. then there was mutiny on board, there was a backlash against the management of the team. 18-year-olds got pissed on a drop of limoncello and threw up everywhere and stood like zombies on pitch. i and my roomie got locked into our rooms. we may have eaten cats for dinner at our one star hotel in the middle of nowhere.

anyway here are a couple of pictures.......am still trying to make sense of it all.





"the bitchy girls"







la frappa, warming up, with her 18-year-old team mate, who she was giving boyfriend advice to: (ERRRRRRRR) "listen you sound like a needy ball buster, cut the guy some slack and stop being such a pain in the arse." she liked my 2 cents so much she came back for seconds.




valiantly trying to do some "damage control" and stop the umptieth goal getting scored against us.....(ERRRRRRR)


YUP. that's us again trying to avoid getting the 3rd goal scored against us. yes, that's right. i think we failed.




"enough is enough:" the valiant blue team (spelt BLUTIME by the organizers....errr) shortly before scoring their first and only mercy goal which involved my kicking the ball somewhere and then ramming into a goal keeper full throttle).




things improved considerably when everyone decided to go to pool.






oh and i went to assisi too and contemplated nunhood.